Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, United Artists, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 26) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the annual “Not-So-Silent Movie Night,” a showing of a silent film in the Pavilion with live organ accompaniment. The film was Steamboat Bill, Jr., a 1928 comedy starring Buster Keaton and his last made independently with Joseph M. Schenck as his producer. The organist was David Marsh, a young man who performed in a floral print shirt and tight blue jeans. Though his photo in the program shows him as blond, when he appeared last night he had dark hair and at first Charles mistook him for San Diego’s regular civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez. Marsh is based in Orange County, where he’s the president of the Orange County Theatre Organ Society. He teaches piano and music theory and used to be director of music technology at Villa Park High School. He’s also refreshingly sly and self-deprecating in his humor (a strong contrast to the egomaniacal Raúl!). He listed two works in the program he was going to play before the movie started – it’s customary for the organist to play a mini-concert while both he and the audience wait for the night to get dark enough to make it possible to see the movie – though last night he added a third work and started the night with it. It was the song “That’s Entertainment!,” written by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz for the 1953 film of their 1930 musical The Band Wagon. The two works listed on his program were an “improvisation on themes from” George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to commemorate the piece’s 100th anniversary (it was first played in New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924 as part of a Paul Whiteman concert called “An Experiment in Modern Music”) and the 1940 British hit “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” with music by Manning Sherwin and lyrics by Eric Maschwitz (who also co-wrote the haunting romantic ballad “These Foolish Things,” though on that song he took his credit as “Eric Marvell”). Though Marsh had introduced his version of Rhapsody in Blue by saying he didn’t know how to play the piece, so he did what organists usually do to play something they don’t know – they string together a few of its themes and call it an “improvisation” – his rendition was quite good and stuck relatively closely to Gershwin’s original conception. His “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” was also quite lovely, though a couple of airplanes (a familiar issue at the Organ Pavilion, especially on summer nights!) flew by and their sound dented, if not quite totally breaking, the tender mood Marsh was creating.

Then it was time for the movie, which though brilliantly funny (especially in its audacious second half) and surprisingly sentimental for a Keaton film, seemed to take an awful long time building up all the exposition needed for the second-half comedy to work. The story takes place in the fictional Mississippi riverboat town of River Junction. William Canfield (Ernest Torrence in a rare sympathetic role for him; he was usually cast as villains; in 1932 he played Professor Moriarty to Clive Brook’s Sherlock Holmes; and in his last film, the San Diego-set I Cover the Waterfront from 1933, he played a human trafficker), known as “Steamboat Bill,” runs the steamboat Stonewall Jackson, only he’s threatened with the loss of his business by the newer, nicer and swankier River King. The new boat is owned by millionaire J. J. King (Tom McGuire), who in a series of quick shots is revealed as also the owner of the town’s bank, the town’s hotel and just about everything else. (Though Keaton was never as obvious as Charlie Chaplin about the social comment in his films, it was nonetheless there; in 1922 he made the short film Cops, inspired by the 1886 bombing of a police parade in Haymarket, Illinois, and here he seems to be setting up the same kind of honest poor family versus unscrupulous tycoon conflict Frank Capra did later – and Capra got his start with another silent comedy giant, Harry Langdon!) Keaton plays Steamboat Bill’s long-lost son, William Canfield, Jr., who shows up at River Junction during a break from college. Steamboat Bill has never seen his son since Jr. was a baby (and Keaton and his nominal director, Charles Riesner, and writer, Carl Harbaugh, never tell us why), and when Jr. arrives in River Junction he’s telegraphed his father that he’ll be wearing a white carnation. Just about every other young man who gets off the train is also wearing a white carnation – including a young man who gives Keaton his in what looks a lot like a Gay cruising sequence, at least in 2024!

When the two Canfields finally encounter each other, Jr. has lost the carnation but is dressed in a beret and a fancy “college” jacket, and is sporting a thin “roo” moustache. Needless to say, Steamboat Bill, Sr. is not happy about having sired so nellie a son, and he insists on Jr. getting rid of the beret and finding a more butch bit of headgear. There’s an intriguing scene in which Sr. has Jr. try on several hats, and in an in-joke the one Jr. most definitively rejects is the porkpie hat that had already been established as Keaton’s trademark in his previous films (and in the 1930’s would become the trademark of jazz genius Lester Young). By chance, Jr.’s girlfriend has followed him to River Junction – and in a pretty typical bit of Romeo and Juliet channeling, she’s Kitty King (17-year-old Marion Byron in her first film), daughter of J. J. King. Naturally it doesn’t help their relationship that her dad is trying to put his dad out of business. At one point King even has the city government (which, of course, he secretly or not-so-secretly controls) condemn the Stonewall Jackson and order Bill, Sr. not to run her. Bill, Sr. takes down the condemnation notice and tears it up. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of doing so in front of the town sheriff, who of course is in King’s pocket, and he gets arrested. Bill, Jr. concocts a plan to help his dad break out of prison by baking an enormous loaf of bread in which are concealed files and other tools Sr. could use to escape, but Sr. – who’s already bought a train ticket to send Jr. back to Boston – won’t take the loaf. Ultimately the end of the loaf falls open, the escape tools fall out, and Jr. ends up in jail in the cell next to his dad’s.

Jr. manages to get himself out just in time for River Junction to be hit by a gigantic storm (the script originally called for the Mississippi River to flood, but a real-life flood on the Mississippi in 1927 forced Keaton and Harbaugh to change it), and the part of Steamboat Bill, Jr. everyone remembers is the big storm in the second half and the havoc it wreaks on the town and its inhabitants. The storm was for real: to create it, Keaton hired six giant airplane motors and set them up around his location on the Sacramento River in northern California. The film’s most audacious gag involves Jr. standing in front of a house as its front wall literally falls down on him, and he’s spared only because he happens to be standing where the house’s open window lands. Keaton had already done this gag in two previous films with a considerably lighter front frame, using surveyors’ instruments to calculate just where he had to stand so the front of the building would not crush him, but this time the building front weighed two tons and he would have been killed for real if he hadn’t been on exactly the right spot when it fell. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, Keaton shot this scene the day after he got a notice from Joseph M. Schenck that this would be the last film the two would make independently, and Keaton was so despondent he literally didn’t care whether he lived or died. (In his later years, Keaton himself admitted that he’d been crazy to attempt that gag.) The film ends the way you’d expect it to, with Jr. saving Sr., Kitty King and her dad from drowning in the river during the storm, and Jr. lassoing a minister with a life preserver to marry him and Kitty on the spot, while there’s a nice worm-turning scene in which the Stonewall Jackson is still upright and sailing while the River King is shown sunk. Along the way there are some fascinating gags, including one in which while he’s in the local jail Jr. starts singing “The Prisoner’s Song” to his dad and making hand gestures to try to communicate that the bread has escape tools, and like the similar gag in Keaton’s 1924 film The Navigator that uses the song “Asleep in the Deep” it’s funny as it stands but would have been even funnier in a film with sound.

Unlike Charlie Chaplin, Keaton loved the idea of sound in films and couldn’t wait to start making them, but after Steamboat Bill, Jr. his life sailed into a perfect storm. Joseph Schenck arranged for Keaton to work at the giant MGM studio because his brother Nicholas Schenck was the president of its parent company, Loew’s, Inc. Unfortunately, Nicholas ran the business from New York but had nothing to do with actual filmmaking; that was in the hands of production chief Louis B. Mayer and his associate, Irving Thalberg. Mayer and Thalberg were notoriously intolerant of maverick filmmakers with independent streaks, and though Keaton fought the system long and well enough to make two more comedy classics, The Cameraman (1928) and Spite Marriage (1929), for his talkie debut Mayer and Thalberg put him in an awful musical, Free and Easy (1930), in which he was totally miscast. Keaton was having other problems than his work situation: his marriage to Natalie Talmadge (whose two sisters, Norma and Constance, were both bigger stars than she was; also Norma Talmadge was Mrs. Joseph Schenck) was disintegrating, and he was responding to both work and personal pressures by upping his alcohol intake. In 1933 MGM fired Keaton, and by the end of the decade he was cranking out cheap two-reelers for Educational and Columbia and recycling the gags he’d created in his glory years. Ultimately Keaton made a comeback of sorts, re-emerging as an elder statesman of comedy as his old films were rediscovered and revived, though he still had to take jobs with crappy studios like American-International to survive (where he worked out great slapstick gags for otherwise infantile movies like Sergeant Dead Head and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine). It’s occurred to me that had Keaton been as compulsively frugal as Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, he could have bought out Joseph Schenck’s share of Schenck/Keaton Pictures and kept making his films independently – but instead he’d spent his money as fast as he’d made it and as a result we were denied a new set of masterpieces in which Keaton could have adapted to sound cinema as well as he did to the silent variety. For an indication of how Keaton’s career might have fared in the sound era under better working conditions, check out his 1930 film Doughboys (which I reviewed on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/02/doughboys-mgm-1930.html), based on Keaton’s own experiences as a draftee in World War I and the one time in his MGM sound career that the studio “let Keaton be Keaton.”

Deadly DILF (Penalty Vox, Tubi Movies, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 25) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie from 2023 (apparently originally made for premium cable, either for the Lifetime Movie Network or the Tubi streaming service, since there were a lot of swear words obviously “bleeped”) called Deadly DILF. “DILF” is an expression I’d never heard before (though Charles had); it’s a term used to describe an older but still sexually attractive man, and according to Wikipedia it’s an acronym for “Dad I’d Like to Fuck.” (There’s also an analogous term for older but still sexually attractive women, “MILF.”) Actually the title is a misnomer because the “deadly” character is not the DILF himself, Rio Logan (Curtis Hamilton), but the young woman who seduces him, Elysium Tofte (Sofia Bryant). Elysium – who explains her unusual first name by saying she was born in Greece and named after the Greek word for “heaven” – has just moved into Rio’s neighborhood with her aunt Kendra (Jeryl Prescott Gallien) and is an undergraduate at the local university. So is Rio; even though he’s 35 he’s still going to school because his college career got interrupted when his mom got cancer and he had to drop out to take care of her. He’s currently married to Tori (Naomi Walley), though he had a previous wife named Mera (Yolanthe Cabau) – pronounced “Mira” – by whom he had a son, Gunnar (Tharen Jerome Todd, Jr.). Tori and Rio are starting a gym business together, though it’s clear she’s the breadwinner in the family. Tori also started dating Rio while he was still married to Mera, which becomes a major point in their arguments later. Tori leaves town on a business trip and Elysium targets Rio, eventually seducing him despite his initial protestations that he’s a married man.

Then, in the manner of so many Lifetime villainesses before her, she decides he’s The Man for her and literally won’t let him alone. Elysium talks herself into a job at Rio’s and Tori’s gym and also transfers so she can be in all Rio’s classes. When she sees Rio in the school library studying with a blonde white girl, Farrah (Daniela Lee), whom he also might be flirting with (director Dylan Vox and writers Eliza Hayes Maher and Scotty Mullen keep it ambiguous), Elysium has a jealous hissy-fit. She responds by vandalizing Rio’s car, first scratching it with her athletic cleats (she’s going to college in the first place on a high-jump scholarship) and then breaking its windows and slashing at least one of its tires. Rio tries to get Elysium kicked off the school’s athletic team by spiking her water bottle with an illegal substance, which turns up on Elysium’s drug test and Coach Mills (Jana Lee Hamblin) throws her off the team. Elysium is determined to get back, which she does by hiding a gun in Gunnar’s bedroom – the gun is Rio’s and in a previous scene we’ve seen her break into the locked box that contains it, an interesting variation on the Chekhov’s pistol principle – and then reporting Rio to the authorities as an unfit parent. Elysium also rigs up a booby trap on Rio’s locker, but the trap kills not Rio but his voice-of-reason brother Jake (Zach Sowers), whom Elysium also tried to seduce but blew it when she called Jake “Rio” in bed. Ultimately Rio takes the gun and threatens to kill Elysium for having ruined his life, but in the meantime her aunt Kendra (ya remember Elysium’s aunt Kendra?) gets in her car and accidentally runs over and kills Rio’s wife Tori (ya remember Rio’s wife Tori?).

The film has one of those bleakly pessimistic endings Lifetime’s writers are all too fond of these days: Rio is in the exercise yard of the local jail, he gets a letter but we only hear the salutation in the voiceover (we never learn who the letter is from or the rest of its contents), and the final scene shows Elysium in a mausoleum leaving flowers and a crust-free jelly sandwich for her dead father (which is the only way we find out Elysium’s last name). Earlier the film had kicked off with a prologue, set six months before the main action, which showed Elysium being chased by an older Black man with a gun, only he’s the one who ends up dead; there are various allusions to this later on but it’s not clear whether the older Black man in this scene is a previous DILF or Elysium’s actual father. There are also two other characters, both people Elysium’s own age: a white guy named Dameon (Michael Deni) who drives by in a fancy red convertible and yells out blatantly sexual taunts at her which she couldn’t be less interested in; and an Asian guy named Chris (Jonathan Tanigaki). We first meet Chris when he and Elysium are peering over the fence separating her back yard from Rio’s and catching look-sees at Rio’s topless – and eventually, presumably naked, though we don’t get that much of a glimpse ourselves – bod as he’s attempting to install an outdoor shower. We get the distinct impression that Chris is Gay and he’s just as interested in Rio’s body as Elysium is. Deadly DILF is a pretty hopeless movie, even by Lifetime standards; director Dylan Vox (who also co-produced this through a company of his own with the inventive name “Penalty Vox”) shows a flair for indirection with his shots of Rio and Elysium touching fingers over her water bottle to show their mutual sexual attraction, but his soft-core porn scene when the two of them finally make it to the bedroom is disappointing and there was a much better one involving two Black protagonists in the recent Lifetime movie Tempted by Love, directed by Talilah Breon from a script by Tamara Gregory based on Terry McMillan’s novel.

The World Gone Mad (Majestic, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after we watched Deadly DILF, my husband Charles and I gathered at the computer for a YouTube post of a 1933 film from the short-lived Majestic studio (a quite interesting independent company that, like Sono Art-World Wide, Tiffany and Mayfair, had the bad luck to launch just before the 1929 stock market crash and the resulting Great Depression) called The World Gone Mad. Directed by Christy Cabanne (the fourth and least talented of the former D. W. Griffith assistants who became directors in their own rights: the others were Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning and Raoul Walsh!) from a script by Edward T. Lowe, Jr., The World Gone Mad’s title is easily the best thing about it. It’s a pretty routine story about a bunch of ostensibly respectable but actually crooked businesspeople, including Christopher Bruno (Louis Calhern, though for some reason Majestic’s title writers spelled his last name “Calhearn”), Grover Cromwell (John St. Polis) and Graham Gaines (Richard Tucker), who have looted the Standard Utility Company and extracted almost all its value, exchanging its shares for those in worthless shell companies. They’re being investigated and are about to be exposed by local district attorney Avery Henderson (Wallis Clark), who’s convinced a corrupt accountant who filed false business records for them to admit his own guilt and turn state’s evidence. In order to keep that from happening, Bruno decides to hire a hit person to kill Henderson, and there’s a grimly amusing scene in which Bruno offers $20,000 for the “hit” on Henderson, the offer filters down to various middlemen each of whom takes a 50 percent cut, so when the job finally reaches the actual shooter, Ramon Salvadore (J. Carrol Naish), he only gets $2,000. As part of the plan, Henderson is lured to the apartment of Carlotta Lamont (Evelyn Brent), girlfriend of the accountant who was going to rat out the rest of the gang, and the scene is staged to look like she and Henderson were having an illicit affair and she shot him out of jealousy.

Henderson’s friend, reporter Andy Terrell (Pat O’Brien, top-billed), is convinced that’s not true, and so are we since we’ve already seen scenes of Henderson at home with his wife Evelyn (Geneva Mitchell) and their son Ralph (Buster Phelps, a typically obnoxious movie kid). There’s a nice running gag early on in the movie about Ralph’s exasperation with his dad because dad has just bought him a model train set, but Ralph never gets a chance to play with it because dad is always running it himself. At one point Ralph audibly wishes his father would disappear, and the audience – already knowing what fate the bad guys have in store for the D.A. – thinks, “Be careful what you wish for, kid! You might just get it!” Though Henderson gets killed, the investigation doesn’t stop because the state governor just appoints a new D.A., Lionel Houston (Neil Hamilton, 33 years before he returned to official law enforcement as Gotham City Police Commissioner Gordon on the 1966 Batman TV series), who continues it. At one point Lionel gets a letter from the original informant that says he can’t live with his guilt any more and he’s committing suicide – which he does, so we never actually see him and we wonder how much his confession will be worth in terms of evidence if and when the cases come to trial. Grover Cromwell, the one gang member who actually feels remorse about all the people who have lost their life savings through the gang’s stock manipulation and other activities, meets with Graham Gaines and tells him that there’s a shipment of gold worth $1 million that will enable them to pay off all the investors and still leave them a tidy profit.

Only it’s a ruse: Cromwell is determined to kill both himself and Gaines, and make it look like an accident so his widow will be able to collect on his life insurance and pay off the investors. So he takes Gaines in his car, ostensibly to the waterfront, but really to crash it into a train (a pretty obvious model) so both he and Gaines will die and pay the ultimate penalty for their crimes. Andy Terrell, who’s been dating Cromwell’s daughter Diane (Mary Brian – reuniting her and O’Brien from the 1931 film The Front Page, in which she played the nice young woman he was going to marry and quit journalism for; it occurs to me that if they’d got married for real she’d have been Mary Brian O’Brien), gets ambushed by the surviving gangsters in the final sequence, but the police, alerted by Lionel, arrive in time and save the good guys from Salvadore, who was there to kill them but ends up shot himself, while the other conspirators are arrested. The World Gone Mad is actually a pretty good movie, though as Charles pointed out it’s full of clichés that were done much better in other people’s films. One thing I liked about it is it’s more explicitly anti-capitalist than most other films from the early Depression era (it also takes place while Prohibition was still in effect, and the infrastructure with which otherwise law-abiding people were supplied with technically illegal booze is very much part of this film). Another cool scene is the one in which Andy and Diane meet in front of a movie theatre showing another Majestic release, The Vampire Bat (also written by Edward T. Lowe, Jr. and directed by Frank Strayer, who made first-rate horror indies like The Vampire Bat and Condemned to Live before he settled in at Columbia for a long-running sinecure directing the Blondie series based on Chic Young’s comic strip). The World Gone Mad is a variable film, with some scenes creatively directed and others given a flat, unatmospheric treatment – one wishes it could have been remade in the film noir era – and, as I said at the outset, though it’s reasonable entertainment for the period and the budget, that great title deserved a much better movie!

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Dead Air" (BBC-TV, BritBox, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 24) I watched an engaging episode of the British TV series Sister Boniface Mysteries, an offshoot of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown series. Both series are set in central England, in the fictional town of “Great Slaughter,” though while Father Brown takes place in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s (one episode announces the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, which took place in 1952 while her coronation was a year later – and her son, King Charles, similarly had to wait a year between his becoming king and his formal coronation), Sister Boniface Mysteries takes place in the 1960’s. This particular episode was called “Dead Air,” and dealt with an illegal “pirate” radio station called “Radio Catherine,” obviously based on the real-life Radio Caroline. The real Radio Caroline offered British listeners American-style rock ‘n’ roll programming, including fast-talking D.J.’s who frequently talked over the beginnings or endings of songs (when I worked at college radio in 1977 promotional singles would frequently carry notations on their labels as to how long the instrumental openings and closings of the songs were so D.J.’s would know how long they could talk over them before the actual vocals began) and paid-for commercials. The stations generally evaded the laws making them illegal by broadcasting from ships permanently anchored more than 12 miles off the British coast, thereby technically achieving legal status because they were broadcasting from international waters. They were finally put out of business by a 1967 Act of Parliament that made it illegal for British companies to advertise on them or British citizens to support them in any way – though Radio Caroline hung on, won an official British broadcasting license in 2017 and still exists today.

“Dead Air” begins with a prologue showing the popularity of “Radio Catherine” and the number of listeners it’s reaching, not only in terms of audience size but the wide variety of class backgrounds they’re from, in an era in which British society was still highly class-stratified. (I remember an anecdote told by the Beatles’ record producer, George Martin, in which Eddie Fisher, then serving in the U.S. Army under a Special Services arrangement that allowed him to continue his career largely uninterrupted, came to Abbey Road Studio in London to record – and was told that, since he was only a private, he’d have to use the servants’ entrance.) Radio Catherine is mainly staffed by four people: Billy King (Thomas Flynn), their star D.J. and founder; his wife, Catherine “Cathy” Bright (Ellen Francis), after whom the station was named; Patt Garrett (Karl Theobald), another D.J. who’s hopelessly in love with Cathy; and the station’s engineer, Nigel Greybone (Sean McKenzie), who’s considerably older than the others. The Great Slaughter police chief, Sam Gillespie (Max Brown), is contending with a visiting officer named Greg (Mark Rainsbury), who’s old and hard of hearing but is determined to bust Radio Catherine at all costs despite Sam’s protestations that he wants to bust real criminals whose crimes involve real harm to real victims instead of putting out of business a radio station that, though technically illegal, isn’t hurting anybody.

The plot kicks off when Billy King is electrocuted in the middle of doing his radio show just after a fiasco in which the cops traced what they thought was the secret location of Radio Catherine’s transmitter (unlike the real Radio Caroline, Radio Catherine is land-based until the very end of the program), only the station got wind of what was going on and moved their equipment, leaving an insulting note behind. Sister Boniface, who as I noted during previous comments on this show seems to be the only person connected to British law enforcement in the 1960’s who’d heard of forensics, is able to figure out whodunit based on an audio analysis of the tape of Billy’s last show. Though most of what was heard on the tape was the last song Billy was playing when he grabbed the “hot” mike and met his end, Billy had left the in-studio mike on when he went to open the studio door to let in the man who turned out to be his killer. Sister Boniface hears a sound in the background of the music and deduces it was the killer’s hearing aid, and therefore Greg was the killer. His motive was that he was actually Cathy’s father, and he’d never forgiven Billy for running off with his daughter three years ago, marrying her and starting a pirate radio station named after her. Ironically, Billy’s and Cathy’s relationship had gone sour over the three years they’d been together, and the only reason they hadn’t broken up was because they felt they needed to stay together to keep Radio Catherine going. In the end Greg is arrested for Billy’s murder and Cathy and Patt Garrett end up together, while the station keeps going via an outside investor named Gabriel Viegas (Tibu Fortes), who’s offered to buy them a ship they can broadcast from, just like the real-life Radio Caroline. There’s also one of the show’s trademark fantasy sequences, which features Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson, impeccably cast as the title character) imagining herself as a Radio Catherine D.J. hosting a show. “Dead Air” was a charming episode of Sister Boniface Mysteries, though a little draggy in the middle as the really interesting part of the show – the doings and misdoings among the Radio Catherine staff both before and after Billy’s murder – take a regrettable back seat to the inevitable working-out of the mystery.

The Elvis Perplex: How “The Seven Ages of Elvis” Shows It

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Works reviewed in this post:

The Seven Ages of Elvis (Sky UK, Fireball Television, Raydar Media, Bleat Post Production, So Speedy, 2017)

Sun Records Sings Elvis Presley (Sun 015047809769, LP, 2024)

Elvis Aron Presley (RCA 07863 67455-2, 4 CD’s, 1982; originally 8 LP’s, 1980)

Last Saturday, August 17 – just a day after the 47th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley on August 16, 1977 – PBS showed a documentary called The Seven Ages of Elvis. The ultra-pretentious title has become all too typical of projects featuring or documenting the successful but troubled life of Elvis Presley. It comes from William Shakespeare’s quote from As You Like It: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.” According to David Upshal, who produced and directed The Seven Ages of Elvis, the titular “seven ages” were “Elvis the Child,” “Elvis the Pelvis” (a reference to the tag line that got attached to Elvis’s early, intense rock ‘n’ roll performances even though Elvis himself hated it), “Elvis in the Army,” “Hollywood Elvis,” “’68 Comeback Elvis,” “Las Vegas Elvis” and “Dead Elvis.” The Shakespearean trappings give an aura of Importance with a capital “I” even though the show as a whole was just a pretty straightforward telling of the well-known story of Elvis’s career and life. He was born January 8, 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi, inside a one-room house that was later moved off its original lot by a new owner who had no idea of its importance. (In the early 1970’s Jerry Hopkins, Elvis’s first serious biographer, ultimately traced its whereabouts and let its then-current owners know they had a piece of cultural history in their possession.) Elvis was the second of twins; the first, Jesse Garon Presley, was stillborn and it was only when the doctor Elvis’s parents, Vernon and Gladys Presley, noticed that there was still activity inside Gladys’s womb that he realized she’d been carrying twins. In 1948 the Presley family moved from Tupelo to Memphis, Tennessee, already a hotbed of Black blues and the rhythm-and-blues style that would later morph into rock ‘n’ roll. It had been the home town of self-proclaimed “Father of the Blues” W. C. Handy, who’d written the first hit blues song, “Memphis Blues,” in 1912 (and got screwed out of the royalties for it until he was able to reclaim the copyright in 1940), and by the early 1950’s it was the home of major blues artists including Howlin’ Wolf (true name: Chester Alan Arthur Burnett), B. B. King, Elmore James, Bobby “Blue” Bland and a young piano player and bandleader named Ike Turner.

It was also the home of a young white man named Sam C. Phillips, who ran an enterprise called the Memphis Recording Service that allowed people with $4 to spare to make a professionally produced record of their voice and whatever instrument they used to accompany themselves. Phillips also owned a portable recording rig that he hired out to record weddings, funerals, lodge meetings and whatever else they wanted documented, and when he wasn’t doing that he ran a recording studio on 706 Union Avenue in Memphis. There he recorded young Black R&B artists and sold their master discs to other companies, usually Chess in Chicago and Modern in L.A., until in 1953 he realized how much money he was losing with that business model and decided to start his own label. Phillips called it “Sun Records” and commissioned a local graphic artist to design a label: a rooster standing triumphant in front of a field of sunbeams. Elvis Presley, a truck driver for Crown Electric, walked into the 706 Union studio for the first time in 1953 to make a record of The Ink Spots’ hit “My Happiness” – ostensibly as a birthday present for his mother, though since the Presleys didn’t own a record player it was probably more just because he wanted to hear what his voice would sound like on professional equipment. Phillips was out of the office that day, but his secretary, Marion Keisker, was and she heard something special in Elvis’s voice. Though the amateur records were usually cut directly to acetate 78-rpm blanks, she made sure to run the studio’s tape recorder and got half of “My Happiness” and all of the other song Elvis made that day, “That’s Where Your Heartaches Begin,” on tape so Phillips could hear it when he got back. Elvis returned to the Memphis Recording Service for a second amateur record – and this time Keisker was out but Phillips was in, and he took down Elvis’s name and phone number with the notation, “Good ballad singer. Hold.” In June 1954 Phillips called Elvis for his first professional session to record a ballad called “Without You,” but didn’t like the result. Then Elvis and the two musicians there to accompany him, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, started jamming on blues songs by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, a minor star in the Black musical world. Phillips was electrified by the band’s version of Crudup’s 1946 hit “That’s All Right, Mama,” and decided then and there to make that Elvis’s first professional record and release it on Sun. For the flip side Elvis and the others recorded “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a country song that had been a hit for Bill Monroe. Phillips would release five Elvis Presley singles on Sun, always coupling a Black R&B cover on one side and a country song on the other, and would bill Elvis as “The Hillbilly Cat” to promote both the Black and white roots of his music.

Then he called a friend and former business partner, Dewey Phillips – The Seven Ages of Elvis says they weren’t related but other sources say Sam and Dewey Phillips were second cousins – who’d landed a job as a D.J. on a Memphis station. Dewey Phillips promoted Elvis extensively and did an interview with him in which he carefully asked Elvis where he’d gone to high school. “Humes,” Elvis said – which in the still-segregated South immediately signaled to the white radio audience that, however Black Elvis might sound, he was really white. Elvis bombed at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry – the manager, Jim Denny, told Elvis, “If I were you, I’d go back to driving a truck” – but scored at the Louisiana Hayride, a Shreveport-based Saturday night radio show that had broken Hank Williams and offered edgier fare than the Opry. In late 1955 Elvis signed a management contract with “Col.” Tom Parker, a sleazy carnival veteran who for the rest of his career steered him away from anything even remotely adventurous and made a series of bad business decisions that, at least in my view, kept Elvis from developing much of his potential. In earlier articles about him I’ve referred to what I call “the Elvis perplex”: the enormous potential talent he had, the little of it he actually used, and the huge popular success he had on the basis of that little. It was Parker who engineered the deal that got Elvis off the tiny Sun label and onto RCA Victor, the biggest record label in the country. It was also Parker who insisted not only that Elvis accept being drafted into the military at the end of 1959 but serve as an ordinary private instead of a special-services assignment that would have enabled him to continue much of his career even while technically in uniform. Parker’s thinking was that rock ‘n’ roll was a flash in the pan, and if he wanted Elvis to have a long-term career he’d have to steer him into safer, less threatening forms of entertainment. He also tamped down Elvis’s rebel image and promoted him as just a good ol’ country boy who loved his mother. Gladys Presley died of a heart attack in 1958 at age 42 (Elvis also died of a heart attack at 42, and his daughter Lisa Marie died of a heart attack at 54, suggesting that the Presley family was genetically predisposed to heart disease) after visiting Elvis in Frankfurt, Germany, where Elvis had been stationed with an artillery unit. Gladys expressed concern that the sound of artillery being test-fired was weakening Elvis’s hearing, and she was right: years later, when Elvis began regular live tours, he had the loudest monitor speakers (the ones that point away from the audience and are there so the musicians can hear themselves and each other) of anyone in the business.

Once Elvis got out of the Army he made a campy movie called G. I. Blues that riffed off his real-life military stint, then was cast in a pro-Native Western called Flaming Star, directed by Don Siegel, that had originally been set for one of Elvis’s favorite actors, Marlon Brando. Unfortunately, Flaming Star was Elvis’s first box-office flop. Director Siegel blamed it on 20th Century-Fox’s promotion; instead of stressing that Elvis emerged as a serious actor in the film (he sang a theme song over the credits and one other song early in the film, but after that it was a non-musical action Western), they released it like any other Elvis movie, and his fans told each other, “He doesn’t sing after the first few minutes. Stay home.” After that Col. Parker shoved him into Blue Hawai’i – and even Upshal’s mostly even-toned narration called that “the film that ruined him.” Blue Hawai’i set the tone for virtually all of Elvis’s subsequent movies: a picturesque location, lots of hot young starlets for Elvis to canoodle with on screen and sing romantic songs to, and nothing in the way of acting challenges for him. A man who had come to Hollywood with ambitions to be the next Brando or James Dean saw he’d been reduced to acting in mindless films set in exotic locales – at one point Elvis himself referred to his next film as “my latest travelogue” – and I’ve often said that one of the most appalling missed opportunities of Elvis’s career was the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. Written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd was a stark, unforgiving melodrama about a man named “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith) who becomes a big star and develops a self-destructive megalomania. Before Kazan cast Griffith – who was superb in the role in every respect but one: he couldn’t sing, and the part needed a singer – he offered it to Elvis. Col. Parker turned it down without even telling Elvis it had been pitched to him. I’m sure Elvis, a fan of Brando and Dean, would have accepted in a heartbeat if he’d known that the man who’d directed both Brando’s and Dean’s star-making vehicles (A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden, respectively) wanted him for a film. In 1968 Elvis was so burned-out as a movie attraction that even Col. Parker couldn’t get him any more million-dollar offers for such crap, and he agreed to let Elvis star in a TV special. Col. Parker’s idea was to have Elvis do a holiday special in which he’d sing Christmas songs, but the show’s sponsor, the Singer sewing-machine company, had other ideas.

They hired a talented young director named Steve Binder who’d made his reputation with The T.A.M.I. Show (1965) – the initials stood for “Teenage Awards Music International,” which was as silly as it sounds – which featured a wide variety of musical acts, both Black (James Brown, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles) and white (The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, Jan and Dean, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas). Binder immediately clashed with Parker – who kept calling him by the anti-Semitic slur “Bindel” – over his ideas for the show. Binder wanted to present Elvis before a live audience (aside from a benefit concert in Hawai’i to raise money for the U.S.S. Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor in 1961, Elvis had not performed live anywhere since 1957) and be reunited with the musicians he’d worked with at Sun, Scotty Moore and drummer D. J. Fontana. (Bassist Bill Black had died in 1965.) He also worked out some sketches, including one in which Elvis sings Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” while being confronted by an actor who strikingly resembles Col. Tom Parker. When Col. Parker saw the show, he was incensed that it contained no Christmas music and threatened to prevent it from being aired – until Binder found a clip of Elvis’s 1957 novelty single “Blue Christmas” from one of the jam sessions and spliced it into the show. Binder also wanted Elvis to make some sort of social comment – this was 1968, after all, the year Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and the Democratic convention in Chicago literally turned into a riot – and eventually he commissioned Billy Goldenberg and Walter Earl Brown to write a song for the show’s finale, “If I Can Dream,” which would evoke King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington and allow Elvis to look like he cared about the state of the country. Alas, no sooner had the Singer special aired that Col. Parker reasserted control over Elvis’s career and worked him into a stint at the International Hotel in Las Vegas (there’s a mistake in The Seven Ages of Elvis: they refer to it as the “Hilton International” but in 1969 it was just the “International” and still owned by the man who’d built it, entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian; it didn’t become a part of the Hilton chain until 1970) that he would repeat twice a year until he died.

Then Col. Parker started booking Elvis on long concert tours throughout the U.S. He never let Elvis perform in any other country because “Col. Tom Parker” was really an undocumented immigrant from The Netherlands named Andreas Van Kuijk, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be let back into the U.S. if he ever left. One of Elvis’s most famous TV shows, the “Satellite Special” from early 1973, was a response to a team of Japanese promoters who wanted Elvis to tour Japan. Instead Col. Parker booked the show for Hawai’i because it was as close as he and Elvis could go to Japan and still be in the United States, and the hall where the concert took place was festooned with Japanese banners. Throughout the 1970’s Elvis worked on an endless treadmill due to the Colonel’s relentless schedule, and he was so burned out that when RCA Victor wanted new records from him, he made the company send mobile equipment to Graceland, the home in Memphis he’d bought for himself and his parents in 1957. In 1974 Col. Parker made the worst deal of his life: for a mere $6 million he sold all the royalties from Elvis’s records back to RCA Victor. Elvis’s “black” biographer, Albert Goldman, suggested he did this because he was a compulsive gambler who owed millions in gambling debts to the Mafia. So when Elvis died he was only worth $5 million and his former wife Priscilla, who took over his estate as trustee for their daughter Lisa Marie, worked her ass off to rehabilitate Elvis’s fortunes, including turning Graceland into a museum and making it a major tourist attraction. The Seven Ages of Elvis ends with the assertion that Elvis dead has been a bigger moneymaker than Elvis live; it claims he’s made more money posthumously than Frank Sinatra, John Lennon and David Bowie combined.

And yet to me Frank Sinatra remains the example of the kind of career Elvis should have had: the far more self-assured Sinatra would have never let an unscrupulous, self-dealing manager like Col. Parker push him around the way Elvis did. One remarkable anecdote about Elvis told by Larry Geller, his hairstylist and spiritual advisor (as I wrote in a previous post about Elvis, only in Hollywood could someone combine those two jobs), was that when Elvis made his 1965 gospel album How Great Thou Art, he wanted the record mixed so he’d be the lead singer in a gospel quartette. Instead, without any word to Elvis in advance, someone at RCA Victor remixed the record to put Elvis’s voice front and center, as it was on all his other records, and reduced his quartette partners to mere backup singers. Elvis didn’t find out about this until he bought a copy of How Great Thou Art as a present for a friend and played it. Geller said he should complain to the record company and demand that his initial mix be restored, but Elvis said, “There’s nothing I could do about it anyway.” The moment I read that, I thought of how Sinatra would have reacted if one of his records had been remixed without his knowledge or consent. He’d have demanded it be changed, and maybe even dropped hints to whoever at his record company had screwed up his album, “And if you don’t change it back, I might just call one of my special friends and have you taken out!” (Since then I’ve read an interview with Joan Deary, who was in charge of Elvis’s records both in the last years of his life and in the 1980’s, who admitted she’d had Elvis’s records remixed to keep his voice front and center because she thought that’s what people buying a record with Elvis’s name on the cover wanted to hear.) I remember my reaction when I heard Way Down in the Jungle Room, a reissue of Elvis’s final Graceland recordings from February and October 1976 (his last studio sessions, though a few live songs he made after that were released), and was stunned at how many of the songs were ballads about heartbreak and relationships gone terribly wrong. It seemed to me that the breakup of his marriage to Priscilla had led him to that kind of material, and had he been a more grounded artist, musician and human being the way Sinatra was, he might have created a deeply moving concept album about love and loss the way Sinatra did when he responded to his breakup with Ava Gardner by creating In the Wee Small Hours (1955), the first true “concept album.” Elvis’s whole career is full of might-have-beens like that, and oh, how I wish that the one time he and Sinatra worked together (on the 1960 Timex-sponsored TV show Frank Sinatra’s Welcome Home Party for Elvis Presley), Sinatra had watched Elvis taking orders from Col. Parker, gone up to him and said, “Just why do you take all that shit from that old man?”

It’s impossible to write about Elvis’s career with any degree of objectivity and not mention his drug use. In that regard, Elvis’s career strikingly parallels Judy Garland’s. Both spent the first half of their careers mostly making movies and the second half doing live shows. Both became prescription drug addicts at relatively early ages, and for the same reason: to keep their weights down to movie camera-friendly levels. And both died drug-related deaths in their 40’s. Though Upshal’s narration for The Seven Ages of Elvis suggests that Elvis’s politics were progressive, and in some respects (notably his affection for Black musicians and the styles they had created) that’s true, Elvis was also enough of a political reactionary that in 1970 he crashed the White House, won a meeting with then-President Richard Nixon, and made Nixon a bizarre offer to rat out other entertainers who were taking drugs. (At least one of the Secret Service agents present on Nixon’s protection detail recalled that Elvis himself looked stoned that day.) To me the most interesting aspect of Elvis’s drug use was the skill with which he constructed an alternative reality that concealed what he was doing to himself from almost everyone around him, especially himself. Elvis, according to Elvis, didn’t take “drugs”; everything he did take came in a little amber bottle or clear glass ampule with a doctor’s name on it. Like most prescription drug abusers, he referred to the substances he ingested as “medications.” And as his career spiraled down in the 1970’s and his marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu broke up, Elvis responded not only by upping his drug intake but also by eating more of the high-cholesterol, high-carbohydrate food he’d grown up with, until he blew up to such enormous size his costumers had to keep letting out his one-piece suit-of-lights stage suits without telling him or giving it away that they were doing so. This has led to all the subsequent jokes about “fat Elvis” and how he managed to maintain his commercial appeal as an entertainer. As Albert Goldman wrote in his 1981 “black biography” Elvis – basically the book Elvis fans love to hate – “One of the bizarre ironies of his career, always characterized by the incongruity between his limited talents and his limitless fame, was the way his myth imposed itself on the world in later years, mounting to ever greater peaks of popularity and power, while the man who was the object of all this adulation was steadily declining to the condition of a hapless wretch. Ultimately, the only way to account for this awesome disparity between cause and effect, between the moribund star and his immensely vital image, is to invoke concepts like royalty or divinity that explain how even a man so far gone that he can barely mount a stage can compel the admiration of millions of people the world around because they believe that in his grotesque body and deadened mind there lies some wondrous essence that gives joy to their own humble existence.” It’s this incongruity that modern-day political commentators are referencing when they compare the increasingly weird and incoherent Donald Trump to “fat Elvis” and marvel at his continuing popularity among a large section of America’s voters.

The four-CD boxed set Elvis Aron Presley was first released as a limited-edition eight-LP box in 1980 and heavily “hyped” by RCA Victor as a definitive CD collection two years later. I’ve been interested in this album for 44 years now, since it first came out, because the first CD promised two key recordings in the Elvis legend: four songs he played at the New Frontier hotel in Las Vegas in 1956 and the complete show he played in Hawai’i as a benefit concert for the memorial for the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor in 1961 – the only live show Elvis ever played between 1957 and 1968. Disc two of Elvis Aron Presley contains “Collectors’ Gold from the Movie Years” (most Elvis fans consider the “movie years” between his return from the Army in 1960 and his comeback TV special in 1968 to be the nadir of his career) and bits from his TV specials. Disc three contains excerpts from his Las Vegas shows and a collection of obscure Elvis singles and album tracks (including his overwrought and very overarranged version of Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” – the hit was by Black woman singer Roberta Flack but I’d heard it before that in a quite beautiful version by Gordon Lightfoot and it was hard for me after that to get used to hearing the song sung by a woman), and the oddball version of the song “Softly, As I Leave You” (an Italian song, originally called “Piano,” by Tony de Vita with Italian lyrics by Giorgio Calabrese and English lyrics by Hal Shaper) as well as its original flip side, “Unchained Melody” (by Alex North with lyrics by Hy Zaret, adapted from the film score North wrote for the 1955 movie Unchained, about California’s pioneering minimum-security prison at Chino), which Elvis recorded in two versions, both live, on April 24, 1977 in Ann Arbor, Michigan and on June 21, 1977 at Rapid City, South Dakota. There’s also a song called “Fool” that was on an Elvis LP that RCA Victor had deleted from its catalog; I remember an interview the compiler of this set, Joan Deary, gave to Goldmine magazine in which she said that ordinarily RCA deleted records once their sales fell below a certain point (“a computer does it”), but “we never delete an Elvis record – sales just go on and on. I haven’t been able to find out why that particular record was deleted.” The fourth CD contained live performances from May and June 1975.

The first true “boxed set” of Elvis’s career, Elvis Aron Presley suffers from Deary’s determination to include as much previously unreleased material as possible – which often meant inferior alternate takes of songs that had been available for years in better renditions than these. It’s also a set full of surprises, and not all of them welcome ones. Both the New Frontier 1956 gig and the Arizona benefit concert of 1961 show how ill at ease Elvis was in live performance despite his famous stage moves – though the New Frontier gig was significant because Elvis heard a white lounge act called Freddy Bell and the Bellboys do their rewrite of Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” and it was Bell’s version, not Thornton’s, that Elvis eventually covered and had one of the biggest hits of his career. (Thornton’s “Hound Dog” credited Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller and veteran bandleader Johnny Otis as songwriters, but Leiber and Stoller claimed they were underage when they signed the original contract and used that to cut Otis out of the royalties for Elvis’s mega-hit version. Also I’d assumed Freddy Bell and the Bellboys were Black, but there’s a film clip here that shows they were white.) The “Collectors’ Gold from the Movie Years” CD includes a lame alternate take of one of the theme songs from Elvis’s films, “Follow That Dream” – which in Bruce Springsteen’s cover from a May 5, 1981 concert in Stockholm, Sweden is a slow, sensitive, heart-rending ballad but in Elvis’s too-fast version is just another silly song from a forgettable film. The full Springsteen concert from Stockholm is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WskRlbSBWuU, and a separate Springsteen recording of “Follow That Dream” at London’s Wembley Arena from June 5, 1981 is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9l6U74HGnQ. (Elvis’s – the original version, not the alternate from the Elvis Aron Presley collection – is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD0xsv2BHFw.) At the same Stockholm concert Springsteen performed Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and prefaced it with a long introduction about Elvis’s untimely death. (It’s at 47:51 of the above-cited video.) “I used to wonder a lot about how someone who seemed like such a big winner could lose so bad in the end, you know?” Springsteen said. “Because he deserved a lot better than what he got. But this song is about living free. It’s about not having to die poor and work in some factory, or it’s about not having to die in some million-dollar mansion and a lot of dope running through you. It’s about feeling yourself strong inside, no matter who you are.”

It’s also impossible to write seriously about Elvis Presley and ignore the whole issue of race. In his loathsome book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, critic Greil Marcus made an attempt to argue that Elvis created a whole new musical style that owed little or nothing to African-American artists. Nonsense: you can’t listen to Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mama” on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtHW8wpDjkg and then Elvis’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCP_g7X31nI without hearing how closely Elvis copied Crudup. Likewise with Elvis’s second single on Sun, “Good Rocking Tonight”: though its composer, Roy Brown, didn’t even have the Black hit on it (Wynonie Harris did), Elvis clearly learned the song from Brown’s version and in particular Brown’s register leaps from his natural baritone to falsetto. I’ve often written that, while Louis Jordan led the first rock ‘n’ roll band, Brown was the first rock ‘n’ roll singer. Brown’s own recollection was that he was leading a dance band and singing ballads in a deep baritone like Billy Eckstine’s, while he had another singer who had a higher voice and sang blues numbers. One night his blues singer called in sick and Brown figured, “Well, we’ll just do ballads then.” Only it was a tough club audience that wanted to hear blues, so without time to rearrange the songs in lower keys Brown just sang them in falsetto – and that night the rock ‘n’ roll voice was born. Brown’s version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgdzS4OSQ1M; Harris’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SllhnR7D8LA and Elvis’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FeWJHUB8aU. Elvis even tried to copy Brown’s vocal leaps, though without Brown’s professional vocal training (like a lot of other Black singers, Brown had started out in Black churches and learned vocal technique from their choir directors) he couldn’t do the leaps as smoothly as Brown could and his attempts created a snapping sound that itself became one of Elvis’s trademarks. And on Elvis’s 1957 Christmas album, he closely copied Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters’ arrangement of “White Christmas” (the Drifters’ version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ6LIS6m8qE and Elvis’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XNXT4-SIK8), though with his incredible vocal range Elvis was able to copy both Bubba Thrasher’s bass voice and McPhatter’s lead tenor. Certainly hearing Elvis’s versions of Black songs back-to-back with the Black originals makes Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler’s frustration with the institutionalized racism of the music business in the 1950’s all the more understandable. “[W]e had a real tough time getting our records played,” Wexler told music historian Arnold Shaw. “All the jocks had to see was the Atlantic label and the name of the artist — and we were dead. We’d say, ‘Just listen and give your listeners a chance to listen.’ But they had a set of stock excuses: ‘Too loud.’ ‘Too rough.’ ‘Doesn’t fit our format.’ They’d never say, ‘We don’t play Black artists.’ But then they’d turn around and play a record of the very same song that was a copy of our record, only it was by a white artist.”

The whole question of Elvis and race comes up at the start of the new LP Sun Records Sings Elvis Presley, with the song “Mystery Train” by Black R&B artist Little Junior Parker. Though this disc is presented as a collection of later Sun artists covering Elvis, Parker’s “Mystery Train” is actually the first recording of the song and Elvis’s is the cover. One other song on Sun Sings Elvis, Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” is also the original recording and Elvis’s the cover, though this time Elvis took the hit away from another white artist. It’s interesting that nine of the 12 songs heard on Sun Sings Elvis were pieces Elvis originally recorded during his all too brief (1 ½ years) tenure as a Sun artist, and even the three that were recorded after that (“Blue Suede Shoes,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Jailhouse Rock”) were made during 1956 and 1957, before Elvis got drafted and lost his edge. (When Elvis died in 1977, someone was able to reach John Lennon for a comment. Lennon said, “Elvis didn’t die last week. He died the day he went into the Army.”) The Sun Sings Elvis compilation is actually a quite good one, featuring Jerry Lee Lewis on three tracks (“Good Rocking Tonight,” in which he inserts a bit of his own star-making hit, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and Lonnie Johnson’s “Tomorrow Night”), Johnny Cash on two (“I Love You Because” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” – the latter one of only two Elvis songs that were covered by The Beatles), Roy Orbison on one (“Trying to Get to You,” originally recorded in 1954 by a Black R&B group called The Eagles, on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfQjLxAeRZo: The Eagles did it first, Elvis second and Orbison third in both chronology and quality) and a couple of more obscure artists, rockabilly legend Sleepy LaBeef on “Baby, Let’s Play House” and The Climates, an excellent late-1960’s Black soul group, reclaiming “Don’t Be Cruel” after Elvis bought it from Otis Blackwell, a major Black R&B artist in his own right as well as co-author of almost all of Little Richard’s songs. Like virtually all writers of songs Elvis recorded, Blackwell had to give Elvis co-credit and half the royalties to get the record made. Blackwell was once asked why he put up with that, and he said, “Because 50 percent of something is a whole lot better than 100 percent of nothing.” The other two songs on Sun Sings Elvis are 1972 releases of the two sides of Elvis’s first Sun single, “That’s All Right, Mama” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” They’re credited here to an artist named “Orion” but were originally released with no artist credit at all. RCA Victor threatened Sun Records and its new majority owner, Shelby Singleton, who had bought 51 percent of the label from Sam C. Phillips in 1969, with a lawsuit, claiming that the artist was actually Elvis and Singleton had released either alternate takes or new recordings without authorization. RCA Victor dropped the suit after voiceprint identification of the records said that the singer was not Elvis – and hearing them now, it’s pretty obvious it isn’t, though it’s a quite good impersonation.

If nothing else, these three releases are a testament to the continuing power of Elvis Presley as both a cultural icon and a commercial industry. It’s been 47 years since Elvis passed and he’s as big a moneymaker as ever. Elvis’s story is also a textbook example of the pitfalls of the music business and how often the original creators get screwed over by the capitalists who run the show. It’s also a uniquely American tragedy of how someone with incredible talent and almost no will power was a sitting duck for the exploitation of Col. Parker – and how Priscilla Presley, through sheer will power, was able to rehabilitate Elvis’s finances after his death (according to David Upshal’s narration for The Seven Ages of Elvis, when Elvis died he was worth $5 million, a nice piece of change but not at all commensurate with what his career had earned. What I’ve long called “The Elvis Perplex” – the gap, not “between his limited talents and his limitless fame,” as Albert Goldman rather unfairly put it, but between his enormous potential, his limited achievement and his continuing repute – is on full view across all three of these media products. In a peculiar way, the story of Elvis Presley is a microcosm of the story of American capitalism and how it has strip-mined this nation’s resources for short-term gain. It also intersects the whole dogged question of race in America and how African-Americans exist only because the white Southern plantation owners wanted literally to own their workers and realized, as slavery advocate John C. Calhoun acknowledged in the 1830’s, that in a nation devoted to the principle that “all men are created equal” (even though in practice that originally meant “all white male landowners”) the permanent servant class, on which they believed a republic had to rest, couldn’t be white. So in a rather twisted way, the story of Elvis Presley is the story of America.

Night Passage (Universal-International, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 22) my husband Charles watched the fifth film in the James Stewart Six-Film Western Collection from Universal: Night Passage. The movie was a major disappointment whose best feature is its title, which suggests a Western/noir fusion like the second film in the box, Winchester ‘73. The title of Night Passage makes it sound like Dark Passage, the novel by David Goodis that became the basis of the third (of four) films Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together (in 1947, written and directed by Delmer Daves), but it’s nowhere near as good a movie. Part of the problem with it is the plot makes virtually no sense; though the story was written by Borden Chase, who wrote such classic Westerns as Red River and Winchester ‘73, the director isn’t Anthony Mann but someone named James Neilson, most of whose credits were for series TV. Stewart plays Grant McLaine, who used to work as a trouble-shooter for the local railroad owned by Ben Kimball (Jay C. Flippen) until Kimball fired him for reasons that remain maddeningly obscure. Supposedly it has to do with McLaine taking a bribe from a gang of criminals to let them rob one of Kimball’s trains, but we begin to suspect after a while that it was really because McLaine was having an affair with Kimball’s wife Verna (Elaine Stewart, presumably no relation). The railroad has reached a dead end in its construction because its trains keep getting held up by a gang of outlaws co-led by Whitey Harbin (Dan Duryea, who turns in by far the best performance in the film even though he’s basically replaying the psycho villain he’d been doing in modern-dress contexts like Fritz Lang’s mid-1940’s film noir classics like Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street) and a bandit nicknamed “The Utica Kid” (Audie Murphy).

So far the robbers have made off with three payrolls for the railroad’s construction workers, and the workers are understandably getting restive and are threatening to walk off the job en masse and head for the nearby gold fields unless Kimball can figure out a way to pay them. The robbers are stopping the trains by toppling water tanks over the tracks, rendering them impassable – when I saw what was going on I joked, “Where’s Buster Keaton when they need him?” (I was thinking of the marvelous gag in Keaton’s 1924 film Sherlock, Jr. in which he wrestles with the spout on a water tower and the water gushes down on top of him, which broke Keaton’s neck for real even though he didn’t realize it until a doctor X-rayed him 11 years later and asked, “When did you break your neck?”) For most of the film Kimball isn’t sure whether Grant is an outlaw working with the train robbers or a good guy trying to stop them, and neither are we except for our movie-conditioned expectations that James Stewart isn’t going to be playing a bad guy. Though the film is called Night Passage, it’s only in the last 15 minutes of its 90-minute running time that we finally get some scenes taking place at night. Until then it’s all set against gorgeous Western scenery (William Daniels, in the third phase of his career after his first phase as Greta Garbo’s favorite cameraman at MGM and his second phase after he quit MGM, signed with Universal and started making films noir like Brute Force, Lured and The Naked City, is the cinematographer) and virtually all in broad daylight. It also doesn’t help that after Kimball fired him, Grant made his living as an itinerant street musician, singing and playing accordion – or that his singing voice, though at least more tolerable than it was in the 1936 MGM musical Born to Dance (where he introduced Cole Porter’s song “Easy to Love” and joked years later in the 1974 compilation film That’s Entertainment that “Easy to Love” was such a great song it even survived him introducing it), drones through a not very funny novelty song called “You Can’t Get Far Without a Railroad.”

The song was written by Ned Washington (lyrics) and Dimitri Tiomkin (music); Tiomkin also did the background score, and that didn’t help either. Ultimately Grant recovers the stolen payroll money (which triggered one of Charles’s pet peeves in movies: the bundle of cash is way too small to be $10,000) and hides it in a shoebox carried by the typically obnoxious movie kid, Joey Adams (Brandon De Wilde). Then the saloon where Verna Kimball and Charlotte “Charlie” Drew (Dianne Foster) work burns up and takes Grant’s accordion with it – though Grant ultimately recovers the money again after it mysteriously disappears from Joey’s shoebox and turns it over to Kimball, who’s able to pay off his workers and keep the railroad going. There’s also a quite charming hard-boiled character named “Miss Vittles” (Olive Carey) who’s marvelous even though she throws herself at Grant, who couldn’t be less interested in her that way. Ultimately the Utica Kid turns out to be Grant’s younger brother, Lee McLaine, though he gets shot and killed in the last minutes and Grant and Charlie end up together. Night Passage is a pretty annoying movie, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” item Anthony Mann was offered the job of directing it and turned it down on the ground that nobody would understand it and Stewart and Murphy wouldn’t be believable as brothers. Mann was right on both counts, but Stewart was so ticked off at him the two never spoke again. Murphy’s casting is one of the film’s major problems: he’s just not a strong enough actor to be credible as the bad guy with some good aspects we’re told his character is. The role should have gone to Paul Newman, Michael Landon, Steve McQueen or one of the many James Dean wanna-bes who were cluttering up Hollywood in those days to take advantage of the death of the original.

Terry McMillan's "Tempted by Love" (Undaunted Content, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 18) I put on a Lifetime movie that I’d deliberately bypassed the night before: Terry McMillan’s “Tempted by Love.” I hadn’t been especially interested in this one – from the promos it looked like Lifetime was poaching on Hallmark’s territory – but it was O.K. if awfully predictable. It was also shown under the title Tempted by Love: A Terry McMillan Presentation, and was reportedly based on a book of the same title by the same author. McMillan’s mission in life seems to be to give African-Americans (and Blacks of other nationalities as well) equal access to the same stupid clichés of romantic fiction as white people, especially white women. The central characters are Ava (Garcelle Beauvais, who also gets an executive-producer credit, as does McMillan), a 50-year-old super-chef who’s head chef at an exclusive restaurant in Brussels (yes, the one in Belgium), who flies back to her home town of Buford, South Carolina to be with her aunt Judy (Loretta Devine), who’s just had an accident that broke her leg; and Luke Bailey (Vaughn W. Hebron), a 32-year-old stud who was aimed for a career as a professional baseball player (he’d won a college scholarship) when he tore his ICL (Google says “ICL” is actually an eye operation for nearsightedness and astigmatism, but the script by Tamara Gregory based on McMillan’s novel makes it seem like an irreparable muscle injury – I think they really meant “ACL,” short for “Anterior Cruciate Ligament,” a knee injury; for more information about it, see https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/diseases--conditions/anterior-cruciate-ligament-acl-injuries/), retreated to Buford and went to work for a local hardware store. Ava and Luke meet when one of Luke’s side jobs is being a chauffeur in a car owned by the same boss he works for at the hardware store.

Though he’s head-over-heels in love with Ava from the moment they meet, despite the 18-year age difference, Luke is also a serious young man whose ambitions are either to obtain a contractor’s license so he can run a construction firm or to train as a professional chef himself. Naturally, he thinks it’s wonderful that a woman chef with a superstar reputation – though one who’s also been fired from her current job long-distance (the white, white-haired Lesbian who’s her current agent – we learn she’s Gay when Ava, on the phone to her, congratulates her for getting rid of her previous girlfriend and acquiring another one – tells her the Brussels restaurant has fired her but she’s lining up another high-end job for her in Zurich) – has figuratively, and ultimately literally, dropped into his lap. Aunt Judy and Ava’s best friend Dina (Donna Biscoe) have both been wondering for years when she’d get serious about a man – she’s had a few casual flings (including one with a co-worker on her last job whom she was hoping would leave his wife for her, but when they finally divorced he married yet another woman) but nothing even remotely serious. Luke keeps pressuring her for a date, and they finally have one, sort of. Before that happens there’s a charming scene taking place on New Year’s Eve in which Judy insists she must have black-eyed peas, and Luke obligingly shows up with two plastic containers for Judy and Ava. Judy appreciates hers while Ava gives Luke some professional advice, including telling him to use pork broth instead of chicken for the stock next time. Ultimately the two have sex, in one of the hottest soft-core porn scenes Lifetime has given us in quite a while – we even get some nice, yummy close-ups of Vaughn W. Hebron’s right nipple – even though Ava is going through menopause (we know that because she’s having hot flashes and the car in which he’s driving her has an air-conditioning system that doesn’t work).

The rest of the movie, effectively directed by Tailiah Breon (a young Black woman who, like so many other directors these days, got her start making music videos) from Tamara Gregory’s O.K. script, leads up to the inevitable crisis in Ava’s and Luke’s relationship. Ava is determined to continue her career and take the job in Zurich, despite osteoarthritis in her arms that’s making it harder for her to do all the chopping involved in cooking, while Luke wants her to stay with him in Buford and accept a job offer from the owner of a local hotel, who wants to hire Ava to supervise the kitchens of the high-end restaurants in the 10 hotels he already owns and the additional ones he wants to build. It builds up to an O. Henry-esque ending in which Luke gets a scholarship to study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris – while Ava takes the Buford job, though they kinda-sorta agree more or less to get back together after he finishes his one-year course at Le Cordon Bleu. Tempted by Love is an O.K. movie but not really anything special (aside from the hot glimpses of the Black male lead’s bod!). Charles burned out on it a half-hour before the end and went to bed, then I had to tell him how it ended when he got up this morning – and though it was all right it was no great shakes, and frankly I like Lifetime’s thrillers better than their romances.

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Stiff Competition" (BBC-TV, Britbox, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, August 17) I watched a couple of shows on KPBS, the local (San Diego) public broadcasting station – a really pretentious documentary called The Seven Ages of Elvis, produced by Sky TV (one of Rupert Murdoch’s companies) in Britain; and, before that, a BBC-TV episode of one of their typically charming British-countryside based mystery dramas, Sister Boniface Mysteries. The episode was called “Stiff Competition” and the principal victim is a middle-aged magician named “The Great Fantini,” though his birth name is Terry Smith (Nigel Boyle). Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson), who seems to have heard of forensics well before anyone else in the British police, watches The Great Fantini at the annual Great Slaughter Talent Show contest rehearse his death-defying “Box of Death” trick. The idea is that a rope and pulley that work automatically will lower a metal box with spikes on each of its rails, and unless he works free from his bondage in time the spikes will stab him to death. As things turn out, the “Box of Death” descends quite a bit more quickly than it was supposed to, and Terry a.k.a. “Fantini” does die ahead of schedule. Sister Boniface, aided by her examination of Fantini’s equipment arranged for her by assistant local police detective, deduces that the rope through which a candle was supposed to burn and set off the trick had been sprayed with hair spray to make it burn faster. But who sabotaged it? Sister Boniface and her contact with the official local police, African-British detective Felix Livingstone (Jerry Iwu) – who’s filling in for her regular one, Sam Gillespie (Max Brown), because he’s off working some sort of undercover case – after the main case was solved he turned up with some sort of explanation for where he’d been and what he was doing, but I couldn’t recall what it was – cycle through a round of logical suspects.

They include Judge Jane Beaufort (Antonia Kinlay), who was being blackmailed by Fantini because years before she’d been his on-stage assistant and had used the name “Debra Cadabra”; Sylvie Simmons (Amy Forrest), mother of 11-year-old singing star Tina Tiny (Georgia Conlan – any relation?), who was Fantini’s principal rival for the talent show’s grand prize; and Leonard Monk (John Thomson), a.k.a. clown “Curly Cuddles,” another potential rival of Fantini’s for the prize. Sister Boniface, who in this show appears to be the only person in British law enforcement (official or otherwise) who’s ever heard of forensics, catches a whiff of hairspray in the rope that was supposed to release the cage of doom but was sabotaged to release it sooner than planned. From this she figures out that the killer is [spoiler alert!] Tina Tiny herself. It seems that she wasn’t an 11-year-old singing sensation after all; the real Tina died earlier and mom Sylvia had her older sister, 14-year-old Angela, impersonate her. Fantini caught her when she was unwrapping her breasts – like the real Judy Garland, who was 16 when she made The Wizard of Oz but had to have her breasts bound (quite painfully) to play the 12-year-old Dorothy Gale, she had to have her genuine womanhood mashed down to play a pre-pubescent girl – and threatened to blow her cover unless she withdrew from the contest and let him win. The talent show goes on and, with both his principal rivals hors de combat (one dead and the other in prison for murdering him), Leonard Monk wins. Then someone makes an offhanded comment to Sister Boniface that she ought to enter the talent contest herself next year, and though she begs off on the ground that competing would mean exhibiting the sin of pride, there’s a charming sequence at the end. Either it’s a fantasy or a representation of an actual contest entry, but whichever, the show ends with Sister Boniface herself in full nun’s gear singing a song about the joys of forensics to a tune from one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. It’s by far the most entertaining bit in this show, which was overall charming but not as good as some of the other Sister Boniface Mysteries I’ve seen, even though the series’ creator, Jude Tindall, wrote the script herself.

The City (American Institute of Planners, Civic Films, Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Wednesday, August 14) in the early afternoon my husband Charles and I stumbled on an intriguing YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g96j5Hagfuc) from someone named Ade Hanft who’d been inspired to re-edit a 1939 film called The City, co-directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke (a documentarian, not to be confused with Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke, billed as “W. S. Van Dyke” and commonly known as “Woody,” who directed the first four Thin Man series films at MGM along with a lot of their best movies) and featuring music by Aaron Copland. Hanft was inspired by a book by New Yorker classical-music critic Alex Ross, who in a chapter on Copland from his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century wrote of The City, “A sequence depicting the congestion of the city inspires vamping repetitive music that anticipates the minimalism of Philip Glass.” Hanft seized on that quote to re-edit the film, cutting it from 32 minutes to 24, substituting a modern recording of Copland’s score for the original (conducted by Max Goberman, who made a ton of money conducting original-cast recordings for Broadway shows and used it to underwrite a complete Haydn symphony series that, alas, he died before he could finish) and removing all but one section of the original narration (written by urban critic Lewis Mumford and read by actor Morris Carnofsky). Hanft’s intent was to make the film seem even more like the movie Koyaanisqatsi (1982), directed by Godfrey Reggio with a musical score by Philip Glass. He even called the result “Copland-isqatsi.”

Of course that piqued my curiosity to see the film in its original form, which I was able to do on an archive.org download (https://archive.org/details/90594-the-city-ray-vwr) which I ran for Charles and I right when he got home from work last night. The City was produced by the American Institute of Planners, under the banner of “Civic Films,” and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Its rather didactic purpose was to promote the construction of “new cities,” free from the congestion and dire living conditions of actually existing cities, that would be carefully planned and constructed in harmony with their environments and kept from getting too large. The film is basically in three sections: a bucolic ode to old-fashioned country life, a lament that its values had been lost in the unplanned growth of modern cities, and a call for a return to a quieter, more human sense of community through carefully planned semi-urban environments. Oddly, the Mumford/Carnofsky narration makes a snide reference to suburbs as not at all what they’re advocating, but the “planned communities” the film is advocating certainly look like suburbs on screen. Charles even picked up on the fact that the family in the “planned community” had an electric refrigerator, not an “icebox” in the literal sense (a box with a block of ice in it). Watching Hanft’s re-edit of the film I was dreading what the narration was going to sound like in the original, but it was refreshingly free of the bombastic style the syndicated newsreel The March of Time made infamous starting in 1935. It helps that Carnovsky’s voice doesn’t have the crack-of-doom intensity of The March of Time’s narrator, Westbrook Van Voorhis, and it helps even more that through long stretches of the film directors Steiner and Van Dyke allowed Carnovsky to shut up and let their images and Copland’s music tell the story unaided.

The City is a fascinating curio, and Copland’s score for the film deserves to be better known. It’s also interesting that it carries over the country-good, city-bad contrast from a lot of films of the period (including innumerable movies in which a central character is framed for a murder he didn’t commit, flees to the country and is reformed through “honest” country values), which I’d always assumed was ideologically from the American Right, in a work that is clearly a product of the Left. Much of the first part of The City looks like Walker Evans, the famous still photographer who documented the Depression, made a movie. At the same time The City is hardly as pioneering as Hanft made it seem; in 1927 Walther Ruttmann had made a similar film called Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and it’s pretty clear Steiner and Van Dyke had seen Ruttmann’s film and been influenced by it (and probably by the similar experiments of Soviet director Dziga Vertov). Indeed, there were a number of films that showed similarly abstract visions of big cities, and not all of them documentaries: fiction films like King Vidor’s The Crowd and Paul Fejos’s Lonesome (both 1928) had scenes strikingly similar to ones in The City. The images of secretaries working at desks in a giant hall busily transcribing letters on typewriters were copied almost exactly from The Crowd, and Steiner and Van Dyke used that image to make the same point Vidor had: to emphasize the dehumanizing aspects of that sort of work. In its original form, with the narration, The City is a bit on the didactic side – though even the 1939 cut of the film has long stretches in which Steiner and Van Dyke trusted their images and Copland’s music to make the points without overstressing them with narration. Hanft’s re-edit is fascinating in its own right even though it makes the film over into an abstract “-qatsi”-esque piece that wasn’t at all what the original filmmakers intended!

That Man from Rio (Les Films Ariane, Les Artistes Associées, Dear Film Produzione, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Tuesday, August 13) Turner Classic Movies did one of their “Summer Under the Stars” day-long salutes to a movie star with a day devoted to French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo (1932-2021), who had made his mark on the screen playing a small-time gangster who consciously modeled himself on Humphrey Bogart in Jean-Luc Godard’s first film as a director, Breathless (1960). As part of their Belmondo marathon they showed a really strange comedy he made in 1964, That Man from Rio, a sort of James Bond spoof which I first encountered under unusual auspices in Mexico in 1967. My mother had spent the previous summer in Mexico and decided that for the summer of 1967 she, my brother and I would live in a small fishing village in Jalisco called Ajijíc. Ajijíc had a small outdoor movie theatre and every week they’d put on a screening that always double-billed a Mexican film and a foreign film. Most of the foreign films were from the U.S. and therefore in English (with Spanish subtitles), but this one was in French with Spanish subtitles, and between my limited French and my limited Spanish I was barely able to piece together what was going on. I’d been reminded of this in an equally quirky way: I’d been to the Mariachi Continental concert in Balboa Park August 6 and among the songs they performed was “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” which I remembered as the title song from a 1965 Mexican movie starring singer Lola Beltrán which we’d seen in Ajijíc.

The film was directed by Philippe de Broca, who seems to have been Belmondo’s go-to director when he wanted to do comedy, and written by a committee including de Broca himself, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Ariane Mnoushkine and Daniel Boulanger. (I looked him up to see if he was any relation to the French composers Nadia and Lili Boulanger, but imdb.com didn’t list any connection.) According to the imdb.com page on That Man from Rio, Steven Spielberg cited it as an inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark and the subsequent Indiana Jones movies, and Jean-Paul Belmondo did his own stunts. I frankly find the latter very hard to believe, since de Broca and his co-writers put Belmondo’s character through some hair-raisingly dangerous predicaments – including dangling him off rafters made of crudely fastened wood, and having him tightrope his way across long metal cables several stories above the ground – I was sure they had a stunt double (or several) for him. That Man from Rio actually starts in the Musée des Hommes in Paris, in which a couple of swarthy Latin types break in to steal a foot-high terra-cotta statue of an idol from the Maltecs, a now-extinct tribe in ancient Brazil. When the museum’s elderly security guard catches them, one of them shoots him with an air gun that emits a poisoned dart. Presumably the poison is an old Maltec one no one alive remembers how to make. Through a rather clunky exposition scene we learn that the stolen statue was one of three, they were discovered by a team of European anthropologists a decade or so earlier, and the archaeologist who owned one of the other statues was murdered for it, and the statue disappeared. Later we get a grim scene in which the film’s principal villain, Professor Norbert Catalán (Jean Servais), murders the possessor of the third statue in the group and steals it.

In case you were wondering – as I was – where Jean-Paul Belmondo fits in to all this, he’s French Army Private Adrien Dufourquet, who along with his friend Lebel (Roger Dumas) has been given a one-week leave to Paris in which he plans to spend most of it with his girlfriend, Agnès Villermosa (Françoise Dorléac). Unfortunately, Agnès is the daughter of one of the three men on that Brazilian expedition lo those many years ago, and he was murdered for his statue back then. Adrien sees Agnès being kidnapped by Professor Catalán and the two Latino thugs we saw in the opening scene. He chases after her in a series of conveyances he quickly loses control of – his ineptitude at giving chase becomes a running gag in the film – only he barely misses her when the baddies get her onto an airliner. Adrien is able to sneak onto the plane – this was well before the days of security screenings, and airport security in this film is so lax Adrien is literally able to buy a ticket to the flight with a vending machine – only he finds himself on his way to Rio de Janeiro. Since he has no passport, the flight authorities say they’re going to detain him at the airport and presumably deport him back to France, but he’s able to escape that fate simply by dashing out of the parked plane when no one is looking, then stealing a cart used to tow the planes into or out of landing position. The rest of the film is one big long chase scene in which Agnès keeps getting carted around Rio by her captors, and Adrien keeps missing her by seconds.

At one point Catalán takes her into his seaplane, and though he doesn’t have any idea how to fly, Adrien steals a yellow monoplane from an amateur pilot who’s just happened to have parked it with its motor running, and gives chase as best he can. When he finally bails out of the plane (which left me feeling sorry for the poor pilot he stole the plane from, who’s going to recover only a useless pile of wreckage), he gets caught in a tree in the middle of an alligator-infested swamp. Fortunately, a hunter comes along in a boat and blasts the alligators (the two closest to Adrien, anyway) with his shotgun, rescuing Our Hero and taking him to a bar called Lola’s which apparently has a whorehouse attached, since the hunter says they can get girls there. Only Lola (Simone Renant), who sings an appropriately raunchy cabaret song as part of the establishment’s entertainment (though she’s singing in Portuguese and we don’t get subtitles) is herself part of Catalán’s sinister plot. Adrien flees and gives chase when he sees Catalán take Agnès in a car; he runs after it and finally tracks them down to an airport that still seems to be under construction. Though the titular locale is Rio de Janeiro, the buildings we see look like the futuristic architecture of Brazil’s purpose-built new capital, Brasilía (which opened for business in 1962, two years before this film was made). Adrien pursues Catalán and his rent-a-thugs through the construction site in a series of gags that made me wish Buster Keaton had made a similarly plotted film in the late 1920’s; he certainly could have, and from the looks of things de Broca had clearly studied Keaton’s work as well as that of similarly physical screen comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tatí.

Ultimately there’s a neat worm-turning ending in which Catalán assembles the statues in the location he’s been guided to by slips of something-or-other in concealed compartments in them (one wonders what they were written on: I don’t think ancient indigenous Brazilians would have access to modern-day paper, which would probably not have survived the thousands of years anyway), and each of the statues contains stones that if assembled in the right order, a light shining through them from the proper direction will reveal the hiding place of the Maltec treasure. Only as soon as the cave lights up from the light from the stones and Catalán starts digging up the fortune in diamonds the MacGuffin statues have led him to, the whole jungle starts collapsing around him. At first it looks like the Maltecs protected their treasure by booby-trapping it, especially since we’ve seen some ominous-looking human skeletons around it. But eventually Adrien and Agnès escape and we find it’s … a Brazilian road crew, bulldozing this section of jungle for a new freeway. That Man in Rio is a clever enough film, with genuinely entertaining chase scenes, but it’s not the sort of plot Belmondo played best and the almost Jerry Lewis-like doofusness of his character gets tiresome after a while. (Remember that this film was made at a time when there was a huge cult around Lewis among French critics, who were routinely proclaiming him the screen’s greatest comedian since Chaplin and Keaton.) I’m glad I finally saw this film again under auspices where at least I could understand it instead of having to piece it together from two languages I didn’t (and still don’t) speak, but it’s really not very good.

Stalked by My Amish Boyfriend (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 11) my husband Charles and I watched Lifetime’s “Premiere” movie, Stalked by My Amish Boyfriend. You could probably write it yourself just based on that silly title, but here I go with a plot summary anyway. Carly Brooks (Leigha Sinnott) is taking a summer vacation just before her senior year at the University of Southern Pennsylvania (which, at least according to a Wikipedia list purporting to show all the colleges in Pennsylvania, doesn’t exist). She’s living with her father, Grant Brooks (John Castle), who’s raised her as a single parent since the death of her mother, and hanging out a lot with her best friend from kindergarten, Jenna (Courtney Grace). Things change dramatically for her when she’s at a coffeehouse where she meets a young man of almost unearthly beauty, Abram Mast (Sam Bullington, whose blond good looks reminded Charles of the early 1990’s pop singer Rick Astley, though he ran me Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” video during one of the commercial breaks and I didn’t think the two looked that much alike). Abram says he’s Amish, though he’s dressed in normal modern clothes, and he explains to Carly after their meet-cute (he bumps into her and she spills her cup of coffee on him) he’s on his “Rumspringa,” a traditional Amish passage-into-manhood ritual in which a young Amish male is allowed to live among “the English” (the all-purpose term for non-Amish people). Carly is up on Amish culture enough to ask why Abram is doing his “Rumspringa” relatively late in life (it’s usually done in one’s teens and is considered a courtship ritual in which you’re expected to end up with a wife), and he says he put it off because his mother became terminally ill and he felt obligated to stay home and take care of her until she died.

The two spend much of the summer together and Abram starts referring to Carly as his girlfriend – which she isn’t; they’ve lain in bed together but have drawn back from actually having sex. Carly tells Abram that she’s going away to college at the University of Southern Pennsylvania to finish her senior year and she doesn’t want the distraction of a boyfriend, but Abram turns up on campus and claims he’s a student there. Carly asks him how that’s possible when Amish usually stop their formal education after the eighth grade, and Abram says he got a correspondence-school diploma after having done high-school work by mail. Carly’s friend Jenna is suspicious of Abram and his presence on campus, and by flirting with a young Black kid in charge of the University of Southern Pennsylvania’s admissions desk she learns that Abram isn’t enrolled at the college at all. Only Abram, whom we’ve already seen in a prologue offing his previous girlfriend Rachel after she threatened to leave him (though in typical Lifetime fashion it’s only until well after we see it that we learn its significance), assaults Jenna in the women’s restroom and leaves her with a lapse of memory. But she recalls enough that when next she sees Carly she tells Carly that Abram is not a student, and when she confronts Abram about it he says that there was a mixup about his mail-order diploma, but he intends to audit classes until the situation is resolved. When Carly runs into a young man on campus named Wyatt (Nick Clark) and offers to take him to a party, Abram suddenly shows up and knocks Wyatt to the ground, where he hits his head on a rock the way Rachel did in the prologue. Fortunately, Wyatt doesn’t die, but he ends up in a coma until the end of the movie.

Abram then knocks out Carly and takes her to an independent Amish community located somewhere in southern Pennsylvania, which has about as much in common with the orthodox Amish as Warren Jeffs’ infamous “Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” did with orthodox Mormonism. There he keeps her in a locked bedroom and announces she’s going to be held there until she agrees to marry him and become a properly submissive Amish wife. Abram’s community turns out to be a sort of Island of Misfit Toys of Amishism; all its members are people who were “shunned” by their previous Amish communities, and they’re living on a farm that was bought by a land development company which later went out of business without building the project they planned for that land. So the misfit Amish squatted on it and started farming it again. Determined that no one from Carly’s former life can ever find her again, Abram first sends out a phony text using Carly’s phone telling Jenna that Carly has willingly agreed to marry him and assume the Amish lifestyle, then smashes the phone to bits with a shovel to make sure no one can use its tracking feature to find Carly. Carly has a heart condition that requires regular doses of a medication, but Abram has a solution for that; he entrusts her care to Mona (Samantha Binkerd), an Amish herbalist who tells Carly that the herb foxglove has the same active ingredient as her prescription med and if she drinks five drops of it with her morning tea, she’ll be fine.

Mona also tells Carly that Abram has a pickup truck stashed on the grounds of the compound and Carly can use it to escape, but Abram somehow gets wind of this (one weakness in the script – Cooper Harrington is the director but no writer is listed on the film’s imdb.com page – is it gives Abram an almost supernatural ability to detect any plots against him) and moves the key, then catches Carly looking in vain for it and subjects her to imprisonment in a D.I.Y. stockade. Carly pleads to be released and ultimately agrees to marry Abram if he’ll let her out, intending to flee once the ceremony is over. To make that possible, she spikes Abram’s teacup with an overdose of foxglove so he’ll get sick and won’t be able to follow her, but eventually he hunts her down in the pickup truck. He’s also been able to overpower her father, who came to the compound intending to rescue Carly but ended up knocked out and tied up in the bed of Abram’s truck. Carly is left alone in the cab of the truck for several minutes, and by the time she thinks to turn on the ignition, it’s too late. Abram shows up, grabs the keys out of the ignition, and throws them into the nearby bushes so no one can find them again. Fortunately for Carly, the cops show up, called by Jenna (ya remember Jenna?), and arrest Abram while letting Carly and her dad go. Stalked by My Amish Boyfriend is every bit as silly as you’d guess from the title, though it has one saving grace: Sam Bullington’s acting as the psycho Amish cutie. Despite the imbecilities of the script, he’s able to turn his affect on the proverbial dime, the almost terminally nice, innocent young man one minute and the desperate killer the next. It would be nice to see him in a better script that offers him more dimension as a character, especially since he’s quite fun to look at (though at my advanced age, I found John Castle as Carly’s dad the sexiest guy in the film), but overall Stalked by My Amish Boyfriend was just as awful as you’d guess from its title and Nick Clark as Wyatt, essentially Carly’s romantic consolation prize, is pretty dorky, especially by comparison to Sam Bullington or John Castle!